prophetic
/prəˈfɛtɪk
/adjective
1Accurately predicting what will happen in the future: his warnings proved prophetic...
- The photo finish judge was to prove his words prophetic.
- Any writer can end up being prophetic, a predictor of the coming gloom.
- And who are the most successfully prophetic when it comes to predicting the future?
2Relating to or characteristic of a prophet or prophecy: the prophetic books of the Old Testament...
- The prophetic books, especially, look forward to a return to this sort of paradise after the day of Judgement.
- Isaiah marks the beginning of the prophetic books of the Old Testament.
- He left Spain again, and in 1279 in Patras wrote his first prophetic book.
Synonyms
prescient, predictive, prophetical, far-seeing, prognostic, divinatory, oracular, sibylline, apocalyptic, fateful, revelatory, inspired
rare vatic, mantic, vaticinal, vaticinatory, prognosticative, augural, adumbrative, fatidic, fatidical
Derivatives
prophetical
- But this is the only factor absent from this prophetical jigsaw.
- The authority of the Bible, as our rule of faith, is demonstrated by its own separate and independent evidences, literary history, moral, internal, prophetical.
- His underlying point remains valid today, although, of course, we now hesitate to make historical statements about the narrative characters in the Elijah and Elisha prophetical stories.
prophetically
/ adverb ...- ‘Earthly lust leads to murder,’ warns the older monk prophetically, and we watch as the seasons advance, and the young man journeys towards a kind of fraught enlightenment.
- Albert Einstein very prophetically said of the Mahatma, ‘Generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this, ever in flesh and blood, walked upon this earth.’
- Ustinov was only 17 when he took his bow in theatre and a year later he faced a movie camera in a film, prophetically titled ‘Hullo Fame’.
Origin
Late 15th century: from French prophétique or late Latin propheticus, from Greek prophētikos 'predicting' (see prophet).